What are the Seven Deadly Sins in the Bible?

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily match my own. - Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

There are few ideas in Christian theology as familiar—or as frequently misunderstood—as the seven deadly sins. They have become part of Western culture far beyond their original religious context, appearing in literature, art, film, and popular discussions of human nature. Yet the familiar list raises an important historical question: Where did this actually come from? Are the seven deadly sins in the Bible?

Behind the development of this idea lies a deeper Christian attempt to understand the human heart: how thoughts become desires, how desires become habits, and how seemingly inward temptations can develop into destructive patterns of behavior. It is also a story about the relationship between Scripture, Christian tradition, Greek philosophy, monastic experience, and medieval theology.

What Are the Seven Deadly Sins?

Although many individual sins are included in biblical writings, the most important early source for the later seven-deadly-sins tradition is the 4th-century monk Evagrius Ponticus (345–399 AD), who developed a systematic list of eight tempting thoughts. Evagrius came originally from Pontus, a region on the southern coast of the Black Sea in modern-day Turkey. He was highly-educated and after serving the church as an ordained reader, he then moved to Constantinople, serving as a deacon under the famous bishop and theologian Gregory Nazianzus.

However, after falling in love with a married woman, he fled to Jerusalem, staying with the famous ascetic woman Melania the Elder. After Evagrius became gravely ill there, he confessed to Melania what had happened in Constantinople and soon recovered. Melania then suggested that he become a monk, which he did, initially in Jerusalem. However, he soon moved to the monastic settlement of Nitria in Egypt, becoming one of the famous Desert Fathers.

In Egypt, Evagrius wrote a number of books of instruction for monks, as well as scriptural commentaries and other works. It was in one of these works, the Praktikos, that Evagrius outlined what he called the eight thoughts (Greek: octo logismoi) but which are usually translated into English as the “eight evil thoughts” or the “eight tempting thoughts.” He introduces this list by claiming that all sins originate with these thoughts:

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In other words, while there are more than eight evil thoughts, these eight represent major categories of thoughts under which all other evil thoughts fall. Accordingly, Evagrius lists the following categories of dangerous thoughts:

While seven of these will no doubt be familiar to most of us, the sixth—acedia—may not, mainly because the Greek word Evagrius used (akedia) is notoriously difficult to translate. However, according to the standard Greek-English lexicon, it encompasses the states of mental and physical sluggishness, apathy, and exhaustion.

Evagrius came up with the concept and number of these evil thoughts by synthesizing Scripture, oral traditions of the Egyptian Desert Fathers, and the theological and philosophical framework of the well-known Christian philosopher Origen of Alexandria. Let’s take a look at those sources.

In another work, the Antirrhêtikos (“Talking Back”), Evagrius had outlined three even larger categories of tempting thoughts into which the eight could be generally divided. He drew these three categories from the Synoptic Gospels' accounts of Christ being tempted in the wilderness. He called them physical thoughts (gluttony, sexual immorality, greed), emotional thoughts (sadness, anger, acedia), and mental thoughts (vainglory and pride).

In addition, he called the evil thoughts logismoi, a Greek word which has many meanings (calculation, reasoning, argument) because he took it from passages like Matthew 15:19, which details how evil thoughts proceed from within the heart. But where might he have gotten the specific number of eight?

Leszek Misiarczyk suggests that Evagrius drew the numeric pattern of these eight temptations from texts like Matthew 12:43–45 and Luke 11:24–26, where an unclean spirit returns with seven other spirits more wicked than itself, thus totaling eight.

In addition to the above scriptural references, Columba Stewart notes that living among the ascetic monks in Egypt, Evagrius clinically observed the psychological hurdles, boredom, anxieties, and temptations that plagued solitary monastics like himself.

Finally, Misiarczyk argues that Evagrius was heavily inspired by Origen of Alexandria, who built upon Stoic philosophical ideas regarding pathe (passions)— irrational, excessive impulses or movements of the soul—and the mind's "first movements" (propatheia). Misiarczyk notes that

Evagrius then adapted these concepts to describe how neutral cognitive impressions can escalate into destructive spiritual failures. It is almost certain that he then passed this list of eight onto one of his students, a Latin-speaking monk named John Cassian.

Cassian, who lived with Evagrius in the Egyptian desert, later ended up in a monastery in the city of Masilia in the Roman Province of Gaul (modern-day Marseilles, France). While in this monastery and in around 420 CE, Cassian was asked to write manuals for monastic practice. In the first of these, The Institutes, he basically wrote the same list of eight, translating them into Latin and calling them the “eight principal vices.”

Cassian’s monastic writings, The Institutes and The Conferences, were highly influential among monastic communities, especially those in the Latin West. Benedict of Nursia (480–547 CE), for instance, wrote his highly influential monastic rule based partly on Cassian’s Institutes. So, how did the list of eight evil thoughts or eight principal vices become seven deadly sins?

In 590 CE, Pope Gregory I (540–604 CE), in his commentary on Job, modified Cassian’s list of eight into “seven principal vices” (Latin: septem principalibus vitiis). How did he do this, and what did he leave out of the original list?

Gregory first merged sadness with acedia, then combined vainglory with pride. Finally he added envy (Latin: Invidia). This gave us a list of seven:

Highly-respected medieval Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE) later referred to Gregory's list in his masterwork the Summa Theologica. However, he called them "capital sins," because they are the primary sinful states of mind which contain the form of all other sins; it is from this designation that they gradually became known as sins that were “deadly,” that is, sins that could engender other sins and vices.

Aquinas retained the sevenfold structure but treated acedia, conventionally translated as sloth, as the capital sin in this position rather than sadness (tristitia). His list remains the standard for the Catholic Church (see paragraph 1866 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church).

The final interpretation of the seven deadly sins we’ll examine also comes from the Middle Ages, specifically from Dante Alighieri (1265–1321 CE), an Italian poet, philosopher, and author of the Divine Comedy, one of the greatest works of medieval literature.

The Divine Comedy is divided into three parts, each corresponding to one realm of the dead: Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. Dante’s tour guide in both Hell and Purgatory is the ancient Roman poet Virgil. In the Purgatory section, Dante depicts Gregory’s seven sins as seven ascending terraces. As souls are cleansed of these sins, an angel carves seven Ps (for peccatum, or sin) on the pilgrim's forehead, erasing one per terrace.

However, Dante regrouped the sins into three categories representing disordered loves rather than simply violated rules:

Dante had the climbers in Purgatory start with Pride at the very bottom because it was the root of all other sins, moving upward through the lighter or more misdirected appetites until they reached Paradise.

Having looked now at the history and various interpretations of the Christian idea of the seven deadly sins, let’s see if we find the seven deadly sins in the Bible.

Scriptural Basis for Seven Deadly Sins

While the codification of seven (or eight) principal sins is not found explicitly in the Bible, there are certainly many biblical discussions concerning each of those sins. To begin with, there is a verse in Proverbs that is probably the closest thing we can find to outlining seven deadly sins in the Bible:

While the notion of seven sins that offend God is clear, the sins listed don’t correspond perfectly to the list the Catholic Church finalized in the Middle Ages. To be sure, we have “haughty eyes,” corresponding perhaps to vainglory, but the rest don’t entirely fit. There are, however, discussions of each deadly sin in various places in the Bible.

Evagrius treated the seven deadly sins as inner cognitive temptations which could lead to the commission of sins. Other early monastic traditions also connected human thoughts and passions to scriptural descriptions of the heart (following Evagrius’ original list):

After spending so much time discussing the seven deadly sins, we should devote some time toward their antidotes: the seven heavenly virtues.

What Are the Seven Heavenly Virtues?

If indeed there are seven deadly sins, then the opposite of those sins must be key Christian virtues. Fourth-century bishop and theologian Ambrose of Milan therefore outlined four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Incidentally, these four had already been written about by philosophers such as Plato (in the Republic Book IV) and the Roman writer Cicero (in On Obligations). These became established in Christian moral theology and remain part of Catholic teaching.

However, Prudentius, a 5th century Christian writer, first wrote about an early list of seven virtues meant to oppose vices in his epic poem Psychomachia ("The Conflict of the Soul") around the year 400 AD. He represented Christian morality as a struggle between the seven deadly sins and the seven heavenly virtues. His virtues, however, differed from the seven virtues later outlined by Pope Gregory I, which were as follows:

Interestingly, while the four cardinal or heavenly virtues are still part of the Catholic Catechism, the seven cardinal virtues are not listed as official church teaching.

Conclusion

The history of the seven deadly sins reveals that the familiar list of seven was not handed down in its final form from the Bible but developed gradually through centuries of Christian reflection. Beginning with Evagrius Ponticus’s eight tempting thoughts, the tradition was shaped by the experiences of early monastic communities, biblical interpretation, Greek philosophy, and the writings of influential Christian thinkers. John Cassian carried Evagrius’s ideas into the Latin West, Pope Gregory I reorganized the list into seven principal vices, and Thomas Aquinas further refined it into the form that remains familiar in Catholic Christianity today.

This history also helps clarify an important distinction: the seven deadly sins are not simply a list of seven specific acts that the Bible declares to be uniquely sinful. Rather, they are categories of disordered desires and attitudes understood to give rise to other sins. So, too, people will not find the seven deadly sins in the Bible. It contains warnings against pride, greed, lust, gluttony, anger, envy, and spiritual negligence, but it does not present them together as the standardized “seven deadly sins.” The tradition is therefore best understood as a later Christian framework for organizing and interpreting biblical teaching about human passions and moral failure.

From the Egyptian desert monks to medieval theologians and poets such as Dante, the seven deadly sins have therefore served as a way for Christians to examine the inner life. Their history demonstrates how Christian theology develops through the interaction of Scripture, tradition, philosophy, pastoral experience, and literary imagination. Although the final list is medieval rather than biblical, the moral concerns behind it remain deeply rooted in the Christian tradition. The enduring significance of the seven deadly sins lies not simply in naming human weaknesses, but in encouraging the self-examination and cultivation of virtue that can overcome them.